Sufficiently Surmising Strategies for Securing Student Sites

There is a rich lode of web-based technology tools just waiting to be discovered and utilized. The unfortunate case is that most of the sites have been blocked or have the potential to be blocked by our school system. In other words, although these sites meet the standards of student-practiced technology, they can also open a Pandora’s Box of liability. It is almost like the powers that be dangling the golden carrot, if you will, in front of the teachers’ faces urging them to press forward into this new frontier, only to have it jerked away because the teachers veered off the path by misled promises of sustenance. There are ways to circumnavigate and get the cart back on the right and true path. We shouldn’t just turn around and head back to the old familiar watering hole just because the road got a little bumpy.

One of the sites on the TeachWeb 2.0 wiki that I really dug was the Go!Animate site. I am here to tell you with certainty that not all of the content is suitable on that site, but it is a very useful site and meets several criteria of the NTCE Definition of 21st Century Literacies which include, but are not limited to:

Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

The web-site allows its users to create animations and post them for fellow users to view and comment on. One of the uses might be an assignment in which the student interprets a class reading in the form of an animation. Another might be for the student to re-purpose an essay in the form of an animated short story. The teacher can also assign a group project during which a student in the group contributes part of a story and each subsequent student builds part of the storyline with the finished product a completed animation short. In the use of this web-site, students will most definitely be using tech-based skills and adding new levels of proficiency to what ever skills they may or may not already have.

Now comes the dark, hairy, smelly, underbellied threat to our journey. Some users can abuse Go!Animate and fill its pages with junk unfit for a seasoned sailor. But! The teacher can be responsible and monitor each of the students’ search history. Or even use Go!Animate as a class project with the teacher being the head honcho and supervising each student’s visit. The visits to the Go!Animate site can be made individually while the rest of the class works on something else like…I don’t know…maybe helping evolve the script for the class’s animated film. Another alternative might be to use the safer, more kid-friendly DomoAnimate where there would be no worries about web content as this site is monitored.(But where is the excitement in that?!?!?)

As always, we as teachers (future teachers in our case) must be vigilant when exploring these new worlds which seem to be popping up at every turn. There are many, many uses for these sites and we should not ban them altogether. (You know, Mark Twain was banned at one time. Probably still is banned somewhere in the Arkansas hills.) We should keep chasing that carrot. One day we might get a chomp. And even if we don’t, won’t the journey be fun?